


The Unmoved Mover

by pinebluffvariant



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, The X-Files Revival, season 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 07:16:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5447897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinebluffvariant/pseuds/pinebluffvariant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The way Margaret is a mother, that’s how Dana imagines herself as a mother: fair, authoritative, loving.  The way she is a daughter - fierce and defiant - that is fully how she expects her son to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unmoved Mover

Standing at the staff coffee machine on the oncology ward, Dana closes her eyes against her humming frustration and stirs another spoon of sugar into the weak brew. It hits her in the face like raindrops blowing upward in a storm: the rage and the fear, the unfairness of it all. She’s stood at too many bedsides in her lifetime and the thought of what might be coming nauseates her. As a physician she should know better. She absolutely does not know better.

Her mother has asked Dana to wait outside while she consults with her doctor, despite the usual protests from her daughter. “I’m a grown woman, Dana. If I have questions for you I’ll make sure to ask them. Now get some coffee.” 

So here she is, thinking about parents and children while the ghosts of the living and the dead swirl about her face in the steam from her mug.

At fifty-one, she finally knows not to argue with the woman who gave her life. The parent-child relationship is recursive, of course. She and Mulder talked about this once on some godforsaken highway, cautiously sharing some light family facts: family temperaments and family roles are a relay race, passed down from one person to the next. It’s the essence of who we are, in a sense, mirrors and versions of those who came before us, paving the way forward. Somehow she knows that even then, when Mulder’s truth was hidden from her by layers of clothing and sarcasm, even then she wanted to make a life with him.

This is the one thought that has kept her sane since she lost her son: that something of her, of the both of them, remains in him, waiting to bloom. 

The way Margaret is a mother, that’s how Dana imagines herself as a mother: fair, authoritative, loving. The way she is a daughter - fierce and defiant - that is fully how she expects her son to be. Mulder once told her he has his grandma Esther’s sly sense of humor. Does William like to play pranks and cap them off with a well-placed pun? Does Esther Kuipers peek out from beneath her great grandson’s eyelids in moments of sheer glee? She hopes so. 

Dana focuses on the humming of the fluorescent lights and the texture of her wool trousers against her freshly shaven legs that nobody else will touch until it’s time to repeat this process, too. There are moments when only discomfort, even pain, help snap her out of these minutes of meandering reflection that borders on self-pity. She takes a hard swallow of the unpleasant liquid and when she knows that nobody’s watching her, she presses her hand, her full palm, against the hot carafe of coffee kept on the burner too long.

There’s no use to this self-indulgence. Her mother needs Doctor Scully. She counts to fifteen, one beat for each year since her body gave away her son to the cruel world and stripped away his last protective shield of flesh and blood, and makes her way back down the hall, past the joys of remission and the grief of grim prognosis echoing around her.

Her mother is propped up in bed when Dana enters, and she is barely able to meet Maggie’s eyes when she looks up from her Southern Living magazine. It hurts to see your parent, your colossus and your beacon, so frail yet so hopeful. The faith is evident in her lined face when Dana finally smiles at her and pulls up a chair to the side of the hospital bed. She knows God is on her side, and this knowledge will carry her wherever she needs to go. 

If only it were that easy; believe in your salvation and your funeral pyre will burn bright and you’ll proudly ascend. The end. But… There is no way to touch the unmoved mover, the origin of motion upon which no motion acts. You can’t know God. All you can know is what’s before you, moving rapidly away. Dana blinks away the beginning of tears and takes another bitter sip.

“Everything alright, sweetie?” her mother asks in a soft voice like she always did when Dana skinned her knee but tried to hide it. The voice Mulder would have used when William did the same. He would be stoic and secretive like his mother, loving and open like his father and grandmother. 

“What did Dr. Yohannes say?” She gets up and pretends not to pace.

“Oh,” Maggie starts and looks down at her lap, makes a dog ear in the recipe for “summer pavlova”, a recipe for a summer she may never see. “It’s the same as before. No, Dana, please put down the chart. I just want to visit with my daughter.”

Chastised, Dana replaces the file in its pouch at the foot of the bed. Her mother won’t allow her to be the doctor, not now, and bizarrely her mind flashes to a photo essay she saw in The Atlantic, of uniformed soldiers, miners and builders in work gear, dancers in costume, in their childhood homes surrounded by their families. Home Again, the headline read. Can you come home again?

And her? She would sit on her mother’s overstuffed couch, lab coat over her suit and her suit over her shoulder holstered gun, government issue of course, with Mulder’s arm around her shoulders and their son’s knees knocking against the coffee table, with her mother and brothers and nieces and nephews flanking them, the improbable unit, to the right. To the left: all the dead, friends and lovers, fathers and daughters.

Her mother’s chuckle breaks the spell. “What’s so funny?” Dana asks. She’s taken her mirror from the bedside table and is checking something, something on her neck, with aging hands, but agile, even with a cannula pulling at the fragile skin. She laughs again and waves Dana over.

On her mother’s neck, close to the collarbone, she sees a purple mark, a bruise. She touches it and presses a little, tries to assess the tenderness. Her mother just laughs. “How did you get this?” she asks and reminds herself to keep her voice steady.

“Not the way I would have liked…,” her mother’s dreamy voice beckons her out of her numbness. Oh. 

“Mom!” 

And once again she is a girl, overhearing her mother and her church friends drop vague dirty references over a plate of eclairs. Melissa liked retelling the one about eight inches long household items.

Margaret’s fingers reach for her daughter’s face, and she looks curious and amused as she inspects Dana’s blue, starched button down. Unsubtly, she pulls on the collar, trying to peek inside.

“Don’t, mom, it’s new-”

“I’m disappointed, Dana,” Margaret says mock-gravely and lets go of the collar. “I was hoping you would have worked things out by now.”

Dana feels herself flush. Of course, ever the Catholic mother-in-law, can’t mind her own business. She stares down at her lap. “Mom, please, we talked about this. It’s not- we aren’t… it’s complicated, mom. And what makes you think I’m someone who walks around with hickeys? Honestly…”

“You don’t think I’ve seen? A thousand times over the years. And Fox’ guilty face. You’re both so predictable.” There is mirth in her mother’s voice. She’s being called on her own bullshit. She never lets this happen.

“It was Easter,” she continues. “Bill had come home on one of his rare visits and you, you were in Los Angeles on some movie premiere? I don’t remember, maybe you were there for work. I remember being happy for you, happy that you finally went on vacation.”

“You sounded surprised on the phone,” Dana remembers.

“I was. My daughter, serious Doctor Scully with her gun and her serious work partner, driving around Southern California? Wineries? I didn’t know what to make of it. But do you know, Dana, what did make sense to me?”

Dana feels small, ripped from the now and tossed into the centrifuge of a past she cherishes, a past she fears and resents. Her and Mulder’s first kiss in public, still dressed in black tie in a taco shack parking lot, their first single room paid with a credit card, the first time he had made her come more than once, with his hands and his mouth, all caution to the wind. She looks into her mother’s bright, smiling eyes, each crow’s foot pointing directly at her. “What?”

“You came home just in time for Easter dinner. The weather must have been nice in California… you breezed into the dining room in a sleeveless blouse, entirely too chipper after so much travel, and helped yourself to scalloped potatoes in a way I hadn’t seen you do in years. My little cat that ate the canary. You thought thought you were so clever with that gauzy scarf, didn’t you?”

Dana’s hand travels north to touch her throat absently, caressing it with the ridges of her fingers and whispers of memory.

“You were happy,” her mother continues. “I don’t think I’ve seen you that happy since then. God help me, but all I could do was thank Him for giving my daughter some out of wedlock pleasure.”

“Oh believe me, mom, God wasn’t the one giving me any of-” she blurts out and feels the blush travel up her body, and a tiny, tiny stirring at the flash of memory of those months, the beginning of the misinformed layperson’s millennium.

“Talk to him, Dana.”

She shakes her head. “Not now.”

“You have to forgive yourselves, move forward.”

“We will,” she says and nods, takes her mother’s hands in hers. She is not sure if it’s a lie. But the contact is a link that grounds her, to herself and to the motion, even as the stasis of the hospital threatens to suffocate her. Her mother has the hands of Irish dock workers. Dana has her father’s hands. Does William have his mother’s hands or ones like his father, hands that make magic?

Margaret’s fingers tremble as Dana holds onto them and looks down at the intricate knots they make in her lap. The chaotic swirl of belonging and love, of struggle and regret, of refusal and commitment, flows through the warmth between them. She squeezes the papery skin over bones and sighs.

“I’m gonna go talk to your doctor, okay? I’ll be right back.”

Margaret nods. “Talk to Dr. Yohannes, then call Fox.”

Dana slips out and closes the door, watching her mother pick up her magazine again through the interior window.

She floats through the corridor to the oncologist’s office and hears barely anything of the prognosis; she is suspended in a dreamlike state of disbelief and finality. Death has never come slowly in her family. People have been suddenly ripped away, shot, discovered and cruelly murdered by their creators, abducted, mangled and pressed into the earth and resurrected. But this? This is slow motion. How cruel of the unmoved mover to not hurry it along. She isn’t sure she can handle a slow decline.

This is what she is thinking when the call comes in. She takes the stairs two at a time and rushes to the lobby in the hope of catching a solid phone signal. Dana stands at the glass doors leading out into the world, and dials. Voicemail, an indirect connection, deniable. “Mulder,” she breathes with her heart in her throat, “please come to the hospital. My mother went into cardiac arrest ten minutes ago.”

As she sprints back to the ICU, before putting on her Doctor Scully armor and barking at the techs to do a better job, she prays her mother knows that her daughter, her good girl, did as she was told. She called.

She stands at attention by yet another bedside, hawkeyed, until tears are brimming in her eyes. She is relieved her son will never see her like this, slipping away, abandoning him. Not again. She hopes that when the time comes, only one person will be there, just like she will for him. 

Her phone rings. "Yeah," she breathes.

"I'm here."


End file.
